Tucked away inside the gates of Scripps College’s Margaret Fowler Garden, the mural “The Flower Vendors” might be unfamiliar to many 5C students.
In Alfredo Ramos Martínez’s expansive 1946 fresco, Indigenous women are set against a serene rural landscape. “The Flower Vendors” exemplifies how audiences have historically viewed Ramos Martínez’s works: decorative, folkloric and largely apolitical.
A new landmark exhibition at Scripps’ Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery seeks to re-politicize the seminal but long-neglected Mexican modernist. On Saturday, Sept. 13, students and community members filled the Williamson for the show’s opening, spilling out into the gallery’s courtyard where a live band played boleros and rancheras music.
Timed ahead of the 80th anniversary of “The Flower Vendors,” “Pintor de Poemas: Unseen Works by Alfredo Ramos Martínez” features over 25 drawings and paintings by Ramos Martínez, including several studies of the mural. At the center of the exhibit is a collection of recently discovered works that illuminate the artist’s political engagements and recontextualize his work as more than just decorative.
“My purpose here was to recast the legacy of the artist as much as possible,” guest curator Robin Dubin SC ’12 said. “I argue that his work was actually a lot more political than is normally thought, and a lot more in conversation with other Mexican muralists.”
Dubin is the director of Louise Stern Fine Arts, an art gallery in West Hollywood that represents Ramos Martinez’s estate and that lent many of the pieces on view in “Pintor de Poemas.” She has spent the last eight years researching the artist and working on a catalog raisonné — a comprehensive, annotated list — of his works.
The show is divided into four sections: Indigenismo, Revolution, Labor and War.
“[Dubin] wanted to put together a show that spoke to something she was seeing in the work, which was a strain of works that talks about labor, about indigenous identity, about revolution and political organizing in Mexico, and about the horrors of racial violence and war,” Williamson Gallery Director Erin M. Curtis PO ’02 said.
Alongside bold, earth-toned drawings and paintings, the walls of the gallery are also printed with images of Ramos Martínez at work. The thread of his personal history carries through each section, as do the histories of Mexico City and Los Angeles — the cities in which he lived and worked.
One drawing in the “Labor” section, the monumental “Mural Concept Study (Los Tortilleros/The Tortilla Makers),” shows Indigenous men and women making tortillas. Several other works in “Labor” set figures among skyscrapers and construction beams in cityscapes of urban labor.
“Individually they labor, but as a collective they create.”
Attendee Kobe Leonor PO ’27 appreciated how the drawings spoke to “unity, community, solidarity and work, and what goes into work, what goes into creation. You know, the creation of communities and cities…those workers creating a skyscraper, the ladies making tortillas and everybody just kind of huddling up and holding each other.”
“Individually they labor, but as a collective they create,” Leonor continued.
In another drawing, “El Defensor/The Protector,” Ramos Martínez overlays the face of a rural laborer, fist raised, on top of a 1932 copy of the Los Angeles Times.
The Times, according to the exhibition text, was a supporter of Mexican Repatriation, a federal campaign of mass deportation during the 1930s. Ramos Martínez’s use of the newspaper was a pointed confrontation of the program, which targeted and displaced around two million people, many of whom were American citizens.
Dubin noted that in keeping a selection of his works out of public view, Ramos Martinez may have been self-censoring out of fear of facing the same backlash or deportation as several of his outspoken contemporaries.
“There was … a desire to set [Ramos Martínez] as this kind of safe foil for these more politically vociferous artists,” Dubin said. “[To set him] as this quote-unquote ‘good Mexican.’”
The Williamson’s reappraisal of Martinez’s work, nearly 100 years later, comes in the wake of a surge in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in the Los Angeles area.
The ICE crackdown, notably targeting Latin Americans, began in the spring and intensified in June, sparking protests across Los Angeles.
Curtis spoke to the “eerie echoes, at the time that we were creating [the exhibit], to everything that has been happening in Los Angeles right now.”
Part of the process of curating “Pintor de Poemas,” she said, involved “looking at the relationship between the Claremont Colleges and the local Mexican communities that were here, of laborers who worked for the colleges and for the citrus industry nearby, and really kind of trying to set everything into a broader history.”
“Pintor de Poemas” not only maps the history of Ramos Martínez’s works and the moment that they arose out of, but also imagines their afterlives.
“We think a lot about these cycles,” Dubin said. “I felt very strongly that these works needed to be seen, and they’ve just never felt more relevant to me, in my lifetime, so I’m very honored to be able to show them.”
Dubin hopes that “Pintor de Poemas” prompts students to take another look at “The Flower Vendors” and the other public art that surrounds us, and to consider the histories that they are embedded in.
“I would really like to see students engage with this public art in a way that is contextualized by its history,” Dubin said.
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